The Man Who Sold America: The Amazing (but True!) Story of Albert D. Lasker and the Creation of the Advertising Century

by Jeffrey L. Cruikshank

  “Quite,” was all Sparkes could muster in response.

  It must have been a relief for Sparkes to say goodbye to Lasker on the docks of Honolulu and go back east as his hyperactive client plunged into his tour of Hawaii. Sparkes had a suitcase full of gold—Lasker’s first round of reminiscences—and a list of contacts to follow up on while his employer circumnavigated the globe. Lasker’s candor and magnetism, and the wonderful yarns that he spun—touching an incredible range of subjects, and spanning eras of change and turbulence—probably sent Sparkes home to North Carolina convinced that he had stumbled upon a plum assignment.

  Where was Albert Lasker headed, in that unsettled fall of 1937?

  The plan, conceived by Albert Lasker’s golfing buddy Gene Sarazen—winner of thirty-nine PGA tournaments, and one of only five “Grand Slam” winners in all of golf history—was to get Lasker’s mind off Flora’s death by sending him on an extended tour around the world in 1937, starting in Hawaii. Of course he would not go alone. The party that ultimately was put together included Lasker, Sarazen and his wife Mary, Flora’s maid, Francie Lasker, and a friend of Francie’s. Their itinerary included stops in Japan, Manchuria, the Philippines, Bali, Java, Singapore, Cambodia, India, Egypt, Italy, France, and England, with the Sarazens leaving the tour after Singapore.

  This was not a typical tour group, including as it did an extremely well-connected businessman and a world-famous golf celebrity. Everywhere they went, they were treated like very important people—even royalty. Old friends, like Lasker’s Washington-era buddy Cal O’Laughlin, Standard Oil’s Walter Teagle, and newspaper magnate Roy Howard (owner of the Scripps-Howard chain), called ahead to get doors opened, and dinners and cocktail parties in their honor took up many of the evenings over the course of the six-month sojourn. General Motors, grateful for Lord & Thomas’s skilled management of the Frigidaire account, had a luxury limousine waiting for them at almost every stop. Traveling for a month in India, Lasker and his entourage enjoyed the use of a private rail car.

  Hawaii, their first stop, set the tone, as Lasker recounted in a letter to the card-playing Partridges back in Chicago:

  We have been taken in hand by a very good friend of the Sarazens—Mr. Francis Brown. He is one of the wealthiest men on the Island and, I gather, by far the most popular. He has about fifteen different homes on the different islands—all of which are constantly staffed but many of which he doesn’t go to for years at a time. He in turn has arranged that his many friends entertain us in their homes, most of which are feudal estates, so we are really getting a picture of the Islands as seen by few people . . .

  The Japanese Premier is one of Mr. Brown’s most intimate friends and he has cabled him of our coming and asking him to extend us any courtesies . . .13

  After spending two weeks in baronial splendor in Hawaii, the group sailed westward to Yokohama. For decades, Lasker had been eager to visit Japan, and now the moment had arrived. Joseph Grew, U.S. ambassador to Japan, took the opportunity to golf with Sarazen, who was a cult figure in Japan. At one public event, some eight thousand people turned out in a drenching rain to watch Sarazen play an exhibition round.

  Lasker, recovering from a torn ligament in his leg, skipped this outing. But his interests lay elsewhere, in any case. He viewed his voyage as an opportunity to meet with potentates and pundits around the world and try to get a sense of where global politics and economics were headed. In the fall of 1937—with war clouds gathering in Europe and Asia—that was no easy task. Relations between Japan and the United States were chilly, with murky subcurrents. As one observer wrote in the wake of Lasker’s stop in Tokyo:

  He enjoyed very much the Foreign Office spokesmen’s conference and got a great kick out of it. After the conference we got together such men as Naghi of Tass, Cox of Reuter, and Fabius, the Dutch journalist. . . . I think the two hours he had with them gave him all kinds of conflicting opinions. When it was over he said he never in his life had been so confused, and thought he had better give up trying to find out what is going on here.14

  In Bali, as the first anniversary of Flora’s death approached, Lasker contracted a tropical disease—perhaps dengue fever. His temperature soared well above 100 degrees, where it remained for several days, causing him to sweat profusely and lose eleven pounds in less than a week. A local doctor concluded that he was suffering from malaria. Lasker, partly delirious, demanded that a different doctor and two nurses be flown in from nearby Java to attend to him (an extravagance that cost him $2,500).

  While in India, Lasker had a chance encounter with John Gunther, journalist and author of Inside Europe (1936). Gunther was conducting research in Asia for the second in his series of nine highly successful “inside” books, which surveyed the world continent by continent. Ten years younger than Lasker, Gunther had grown up in Cincinnati and Chicago, attended the University of Chicago—of which Lasker was now a trustee—and knew Lasker by reputation. Remembered today mainly for his compelling account of his son’s death from a brain tumor (Death Be Not Proud, 1949), Gunther was hired by the Lasker family after Albert’s death to write his authorized biography.

  From South Asia, the Lasker party made their way to Southern Europe. Here, as elsewhere, Lasker kept his sharp eye trained on social, political, and economic trends. In Italy, he saw Mussolini’s fascist regime up close and despised what he saw. He witnessed firsthand a resurgent anti-Semitism and foresaw the coming global war:

  Here in Europe, the jitters that they have been feeling for the past several months are quieted for the moment, but to my notion, only quieted. When things are not in turmoil here, it is only because of momentary exhaustion, everyone is giving everyone else a breathing spell. However, it is pleasant to feel that the dynamite fuse is not likely to go off at the moment. For the longer pull, I still feel that war is in the making in Europe, and I hope I am wrong, but I know I am not.15

  The party’s last stop was England, where Albert had a busy schedule, including appointments in London with Sir Josiah Stamp: chairman of the London, Midland and Scottish Railway and one of the richest men in England. Stamp explained how he worked with his unions to run his railroad and told Lasker that the United States was two or three decades behind Europe when it came to labor relations. Reflecting on this conversation and others, Lasker realized that he, too, was an “employer” of consequence—not through Lord & Thomas, but through the boards of the companies he sat on.

  He had spent half a year educating himself on the state of the world and the responsibilities of employers, and now he was headed home. He had a vision about how the world of work could be made more humane, and more efficient. What if he could make his newfound awareness—in his word—“contagious”?

  The details of his plan mostly have to be inferred.16 Lasker evidently believed that the strategy that had rescued the California chain store operators—first winning over their own workforce, then bringing in natural external allies such as the peach growers, and finally wooing the public at large—could be applied on a grand scale. Like the chain stores, American capitalism was under attack, and (as Lasker saw it) deservedly so. Only by applying the “velvet touch” across the entire economy could capitalism be rescued from itself.

  Equally important, capitalism would be saved from the Democrats, Franklin Roosevelt, and the New Deal. Lasker had met Roosevelt at the White House in the summer of 1937. Although they talked at great length about anti-Semitism and about the state of the American railroads, Lasker—who had no idea why he had been summoned to this private lunch with the president—came away mystified and unimpressed.

  Now, not quite a year later, brimming over with impressions from his conversations around the world, his negative opinions about the New Deal had softened somewhat. “I think we would have been through a terrible ferment if there had been no Roosevelt.” The New Deal was objectionable not because it was evil, but because it was fundamentally bureaucratic, went too far, and moved too fast.

  As Lasker s
aw it, the time had come for the business community to solve its own problems by rebuilding its foundations. A first and necessary step would be the creation of national labor unions on the European model. A second would be the public embrace by business of federal regulations on wages and hours. Other substantive and symbolic acts would follow, all with an eye toward reshaping the national economic and political debate. “Public relations is the art of private relations,” Lasker declared to Sparkes: “In [business leaders’] relations to themselves, they had better position themselves to meet the demands of the day, or they won’t have any proper public relations. And I honestly think if they would, the public relations would pretty soon take care of itself. If the people really felt that there was sympathetic leadership, the people would force the politicians to give recognition of that.” In other words, business would mend its fences with its various publics. Once that was accomplished, politicians would feel compelled to make sweeping and appropriate changes to the American economy and society.

  The scheme was inextricably bound up in Lasker’s conception of himself, his stage of life—in his late fifties, recently widowed, and wealthy—and his recurring sense of superficiality and insubstantiality. The grandiosity of the plan, aimed at fundamentally transforming American society, also reflected Lasker’s deepening emotional distress.

  Upon his return to the United States, Lasker arranged a meeting with Roy Howard and told him of the plan. Howard provided Lasker with letters of introduction to as many as a hundred business leaders, and in the spring of 1938, Lasker set up a series of one-on-one talks with many of those leaders, beginning in Chicago and fanning outward. “Mr. Albert D. Lasker . . . has had a couple of talks with me on a matter in which he is very much interested and has interested me, and to which he has evinced a willingness to devote his time and money,” wrote Joseph P. Kennedy to New York banker Thomas W. Lamont in May. “I don’t know whether it is anything in which you might be interested, but I told him I would talk it over with you.”17

  Lasker also tried to proselytize on a grander scale. In a rambling conversation with Sparkes, he made reference to a recent meeting in New York—one of a half-dozen such meetings—that included rival advertising magnate (and former Lord & Thomas employee) Bruce Barton, the executive chairman of DuPont, the president of Johns Manville, the senior vice president in charge of labor relations of Standard Oil of New Jersey, a long-time labor-relations expert from the Rockefeller empire, and movie czar Will Hays. Lasker lectured his audience on their opportunities and obligations as business leaders and molders of public opinion. “When I left the room,” he recalled, “I heard Bruce say, ‘That was the ablest explanation and exploration of the situation in which American business finds itself I have ever heard,’ and the other men concurred that they had heard it many times, but the situation had never been made so clear to them.”

  But that meeting, like Lasker’s larger campaign, led only to disappointment. “I had failed,” he admitted to his ghostwriter, “because I hadn’t inspired them to action.” Once again, he had been reduced to the role of mere propagandist, and he found that bitterly disappointing:

  I had been so many years with these business leaders that I know how to approach them. I know how to present it, put on an act, not to make an impression but to get them to appraise their situation. But if the purpose to which I had dedicated myself has failed—to get them to do something about it—so to me the thing was a complete failure, and far from being inspired or complimented by what Barton said, I knew somewhere down the line I was lacking at the moment of opportunity, because there certainly is opportunity for someone to be a leader here.

  Now, if I had the strength in me, they would follow me. Then I realized what it was. I have been too superficial all my life. I could propagandize them on what was the matter, but I didn’t have the strength to take it apart and make them see what was to be done . . . I wasn’t a big man.

  Albert Lasker usually cared little about his stature. But by the spring of 1938, he was fragile and rudderless, and the perception that he “wasn’t a big man” was an outsized blow. He saw himself as a weak and small man, unable to justify his existence.

  In July, Lasker announced abruptly that he was moving the headquarters of Lord & Thomas from Chicago to New York, effective immediately, and that he would be retiring from the presidency of Lord & Thomas as of October 1.

  To understand the significance of these proposed changes, we need to visit Albert Lasker on a typical day in that tumultuous spring of 1938.18 The setting is the Palmolive Building, at 919 North Michigan Avenue in Chicago—later the headquarters of Playboy magazine, and today a luxury condominium complex.

  Lasker’s office and conference room were separated from the rest of Lord & Thomas’s offices on the eighteenth floor by a hallway and a reception room, with a checkerboard flooring of antique Italian tile that Lasker had picked up on one of his European trips.19 A visitor had to pass through three sets of doors to get to the inner sanctum. “Lasker walked through these like a man in a trance,” his biographer observed, “as if he were totally oblivious of the barriers.”20 But Lasker’s visitors were acutely aware of these barriers.

  Every day, before Lasker arrived, a secretary checked and adjusted his desk clock. (It tended to lose about two minutes a day.) She filled his fountain pens with ink, and sharpened and put in the tray on his desk a specific array of colored pencils: three green, three brown, and one yellow. She then copied parts of Lasker’s “work sheet” from the day before onto a clean sheet of white paper. (Uncompleted tasks were rolled forward day by day until they were completed and crossed off the work sheet.) Appointments for the day were typed out on a piece of small notepaper, a copy of which was also given to Lasker’s chauffeur when he arrived in the office. The little green book on his desk was checked for impending birthdays or anniversaries, reminders of which were typed up several days in advance—and left there until Lasker either acted on the reminder or threw it away.

  The schedule and the day’s mail were placed in a manila folder positioned every day on the same spot on Lasker’s desk. The most important correspondence went on top. Letters written in illegible longhand were typed before being put in the folder for his review. Letters written in German were translated. Letters asking for money were culled unless the correspondent showed up in Lasker’s address book as a personal friend. A report on the daily sales figures for Kotex and Kleenex were also included in this folder, as were daily newspaper columns by Walter Lippman, Dorothy Thompson, and Mark Sullivan.

  A white memo pad was positioned next to the desk blotter. The cigarette box on the desk was topped off—always with George Washington Hill’s Lucky Strikes—and matches placed nearby. The humidor was stocked with boxes of Antonio y Cleopatra Claras ($13.80 per hundred, purchased at the newsstand in the lobby). Everything was in place for the master’s arrival.

  That generally happened around 9:00 a.m., although punctuality was not one of Lasker’s strong suits. One of the first things he did upon arrival was to sit for a shave in the barber’s chair in the washroom that adjoined his office. While he was being attended to by George Andrews, who had been his barber for a quarter-century, he was not to be disturbed, unless for a long-distance call or a call he had already said that he wanted to take. In those cases, a secretary ventured into the impromptu barbershop, announced who was on the line, and gave Lasker the opportunity to take the call. On rare occasions, senior Lord & Thomas managers would approach the open doorway and make quick reports. (“That is one of the best chances to talk to him,” confided Los Angeles office head Don Francisco, “because he can’t talk back.”21) Meanwhile, the office staff was placing the flowers that his chauffeur brought in from the Mill Farm Road estate in vases—fresh water daily—set in prominent places, including the conference room’s fourteen-foot eighteenth-century Sheraton dining table.22

  Next came an hour or more devoted to the daily correspondence file, with Lasker scribbling comments in pe
ncil on the various letters and reports. During this ritual—and in fact, throughout most of the day—the secretaries were under strict orders to refrain from speaking to him if a typed message would suffice.

  Correspondence was typically followed by a dictation session, when Lasker strode around his office giving oral responses to his letters, issuing directives to his subordinates in Chicago, New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Toronto, London, or Paris, or perhaps nudging family members in one direction or another. (Letters to one member of the immediate family were automatically copied and sent to all others.)

  Outgoing phone calls were placed in the order that Lasker specified. When phone calls came in, the secretaries checked Lasker’s “black book” to see if he knew the caller. If he did, the secretary typed out the name and put it in front of him, and he either took the call or shook his head no. When someone was relegated to the “no” list often enough, they stayed there; Lasker was henceforth “either out of the city” or “tied up” when that person called. One woman in particular achieved a special deep-banishment status: “Mrs. Mina Shakman will send letters to Mr. Lasker and seldom is her name signed. The handwriting is large and unmistakable. Never show them to Mr. Lasker but discard them. Should she call on the telephone she will say it is a personal friend but he is not to be told that she has called. Treat with kindness always so that she cannot take offense.”

  Of course, no one who wasn’t known to Lasker could hope to walk in off the street, pass through those three sets of doors, and secure an audience with the master. Even if they carried an impressive letter of introduction, they were asked to leave the letter with the receptionist, who would get back to the visitor as soon as possible.